WSJ Points Out Problems in NYT's Reporting of Fr. Murphy and Cardinal Ratzinger

Laurie Goodman of the NYT either deliberately or through incompetence bungled her story about how Cardinal Ratzinger supposedly exonerated Fr. Murphy of Wisconsin while he stood before an ecclesiastical criminal tribunal for sexually abusing hundreds of children.

If she had so libeled anybody else, right now, she and the NYT would be getting sued for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.  Read the WSJ piece here.

The Brouhaha Over The Pope

I might be the last to have heard about these events, but it has lately come to my attention that the Holy Father is himself being accused of aiding and abetting child molestation, specifically by ordering the abandonment of the church criminal trial of a vicious child molesting priest in Wisconsin.  The New York Times' Laurie Goodstein "broke" the story, which in reality turns out to be little more than a well-orchestrated hoax, as Fr. Raymond J. DeSouza shows.  In fact, not only do the documents cited by Ms. Goodstein as evidence flatly contradict her assertions, but neither she nor any of the other papers or blogs to carry the story have ever contacted Fr. Thomas Brundage, ecclesiastical judge in the original case that was supposedly thrown out by then-Cardinal Ratzinger.  As the Anchoress points out, this sham is just the next in a string of annual hoaxes, fabrications, and exaggerations that by pure happenstance all come at Eastertide.

Sincere, devoted Catholics are more sickened than anyone else by the horrorific revelations of diabolical priestly sin and of the horrendous abdication of episcopal responsibility that have wracked the Church these last ten and twenty years.  But that's not what these fabricated accusations are about.  Nor are the legitimate stories, for the most part, being so vigorously reported because of a hunger and thirst for justice on the part of the media.  This brouhaha is about ideology.  That's why other organizations, a number of which are far more deeply saturated in this wickedness, are left unscathed by the media; it's why the media won't hesitate to run journalistic garbage as news.  Ideology?  Yes.  Sexual ideology - specifically, birth control, fornication, homosexuality, women's ordination, and so on.

We must pray for our Holy Father.  He has recently asked for prayers that he will not flee from ravening wolves who want only to shipwreck the Church.  This opportunity is one we must not miss to band together with each other and Christ, and to walk with this cross on our shoulder, together, to Calvary.

The Paper It's Written On

I wonder whether it has occured to Bart Stupak and his group of pro-life democrats that in the hours after the announcement of the deal they've brokered with the White House, there is a deafening silence from the left, and especially from the abortionist left (if one need distinguish).  Granted, it has only been a few hours.  NARAL's website makes no mention.  The online stories carried by the MSM make no mention.  Nobody is mentioning the reaction of the abortionists.

I suspect that's because there isn't any.

They know what Bart Stupak and his (I believe sincere) colleagues have allowed themselves not to know.  The abortionists know that the vaunted executive order to clarify how a health-care plan that expressly covers abortion does not in fact do so, if it is ever actually issued, will not be worth the paper it is written on.  With the television cameras off, and they will be off, the President will never get around to it; and the calls from Stupak and his group that he do so will not be heard outside of Congress, or perhaps outside of congressmen's offices, perhaps.  And if the order is actually, in some imaginary world, issued, it can as easily be rescinded.

If any of the above were false - if an executive order carried more weight than legislation, rather than less - the abortionists wouldn't have fought so tenaciously to keep it out of the law, and they wouldn't be so taciturn about the whole thing suddenly.  But wait, I do hear noises, after all: the sound of snickering in sleaves.
I am trying hard not to judge Stupak and his group.  The amount of pressure that they have been receiving has been enormous.  I think it safe to say that the spiritual combat is not yet over.

Priceless Irony

A UK court made an excellent ruling today.  A law in the UK, passed by parliament and authorized by the Queen in 2007, prohibited organizations from discriminating against homosexual couples - that is, any service or good, not strictly religious, could not be denied to a homosexual couple if it would be permitted to a hetersexual couple.  A number of dioceses began to spin-off (secularize) their adoption services, etc., so that those agencies could continue doing good work without the Church having to be implicated.  A poor solution by any standards, but an understandable one, too.

The statute contained its own demise, though.  In a selfish bid for special status, the statute included a provision that exempted organizations whose purpose was to serve persons of one particular sexual orientation (the homosexualists of course meant their orientation).  The homosexualist groups wanted this provision included so that they could exclude and refuse to serve heterosexuals.  In an almost inconceivably (these days) fair judgment, the justice who heard a relevant case has ruled today that the same provision provides protection to any organization, provided their mission includes service to only one sexual orientation.  The wicked statute is thus effectively gutted, its heart pulled out right through its own loophole.

Read all about it.

Archbishop Chaput Weighs In...

Archbishop Chaput of Denver wrote a column in his diocesan newspaper yesterday clarifying the position of the U.S. Bishops with respect to the current Obamacare baby-killing governmental power grab:


The Church in America opposes it, unambiguously and for several reasons.  Read all about it.

State Nullification is Back

For those of you who are unaware, there is a constitutional law concept called "state nullification."  What it is, in a nutshell, is the theory that a state has the right, as the source of authority and the basic unit of governance in the United States, to void a federal law within its boundaries.  Nullification was a big deal before the Civil War, especially in the 1830s.  The question was settled by the Civil War.  The federal government's in charge.  That's it.

Until now.

Different theories of nullification have existed from the beginning.  The most plausible one says basically, "Hey, we've got this Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that says:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So therefore, if a power is not delegated to the federal government, but reserved to the respective states, then if the federal government tries to use that power, a state should have override within its boundaries, because the power is reserved to the state."

Now, with the healthcare reform effort becoming more and more divisive and partisan, and more and more expensive (remember when it was supposed to be budget neutral?), states are fighting back to protect their citizens from this economic trainwreck-in-the-making as best they can.  Read this New York Times article to see how Virginia is leading the way.

So why is this appearing on a blog dedicated to the spiritual life?  Well, simply, because I believe that we are being lied to.  We are (were) being told it will cost nothing, when in reality it will add to the mounting debt that is literally going to enslave our children and grandchildren to foreigners who do not live near them or care about them.  We are being told it will not damage the private sector, but "rein it in."  In reality, it will destroy the insurance industry that has served most of us reasonably well for decades, leaving only government programs to help us - DMV-style and at massive expense.  Further government involvement in private life will further replace family and community bonds of charity, and seemingly absolve those who neglect the need of their family and neighbors.  Lastly, and perhaps most deviously, I believe that the American people is being deliberated manipulated emotionally to make this government expansion possible - they are playing to our real hard feelings about people we've known who've needed treatment and - many times for reasons not actually related to lack of coverage - been unable to get it.  They are offering us a health-panacea.  For materialists, who believe there is nothing beyond this life, health is the highest good, and a panacea is the key to happiness.  They are essentially promising, in so many words, heaven - or a piece of it - on earth.  They are doing so without reference to Christ, our only real hope of real salvation.  The government is proposing itself as a provider, as a caretaker, as a father.  It is setting itself up increasingly over and against Christ.  That's not good.

We need to pray very hard for our country.  We Christians need to lead the way in depoliticizing this issue so that we can look for creative ways to extend our society's immense resources to those who go without basic needs met - ways that will not further empower a massive, inefficient, power-hungry government bureaucracy - ways that will actually address the real problems of real people.

An Interesting Marriage Proposal...

Msgr. Charlie Pope, of our own Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has an interesting proposal concerning marriage.  No, he's not getting hitched - he's already happily married to Mother Church.  So what's his big idea?  It boils down to this: if the world is going to redefine marriage to suit the homosexualist agenda, then the Church should come up with a new name for what used to be called marriage.

Happily, he has an idea for a new term, or rather, an old term.  HOLY Matrimony.
 .
Click here to read the rest of his marriage proposal.

DC vs. the Church

The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., announced on Tuesday that it had to close its adoption program
within the District of Columbia.  The decision to do so was made as the only feasible alternative to compliance with an unjust law promulgated by the DC City Council several months back.  The law prohibits discrimination against "married" gay couples in numerous matters, including adoption.  The fact that so many people cannot see the difference between holy matrimony and homosexual unions shows the depravity into which our culture has descended.

The Church in DC has very manfully despised the opinion of the world on this matter, and very maternally cared more for the authentic welfare of her children than for the esteem of reprobates.

It's time to get praying, very, very hard.

An Interesting Article about Vampires and Moral Relativism

Defanged: about how a culture unable to say, "Evil," when it sees evil is a culture that cannot defend itself, from a blog I just encountered for the first time called Hey Miller.  The article basically argues that the media, what Peter Kreeft calls informal educators in his book How to Win the Culture Wars, have for some time been teaching us moral relativism.  In his blog, Miller shows how a number of very successful novels, plays, and movies have been conducting a sly campaign to teach us that right isn't right and that wrong isn't wrong.  They have been doing so by sleight of hand, substituting the psychological complexity of persons for the morality of their acts.

Thanks for the link, Eric.  (For those of you who have never read it, the Daily Eudemon is a genuinely intelligent blog with a variety of topics routinely covered.)

Over THIS?

Pro-Abortion America (NOW, NARAL, etc.) have fought like a bunch of linebackers to keep Tim Tebow's extremist advertisements off the air. Check 'em out; but brace yourself, they'll make even the most resolute pro-lifer grimace.

Lol. Now that you've watched the entirely innocuous ads with Tim Tebow and his mom, are you as perplexed as I am about why the abortionists would try to keep these off the air? Their whoopin' and hollerin' has caused more of a fuss than these ads could ever have done by themselves. It's awesome, really. Normally, we traditionally-minded Christians are the ones who drive up the ratings of our enemy's propaganda. We get all worked up about a nasty movie or play and make all sorts of otherwise unaware bystanders suddenly become very interested. This time, the shoe is on the other foot.

Now, of course the ads aren't exactly innocuous. In fact, even though they say so little, they are deadly poison to the abortion industry. The have two attractive people, who clearly love each other immensely, and one of whom is famous - now even outside of his professional reputation. (In fact, opposition to the ad has probably turned Tim Tebow, at least for now, into a household name.) So why are these ads poison to those people? Because the ads undermine the mentality that makes abortion possible. For decades and decades, America has slowly been buying the lie that most of us know from our own experience isn't true: babies are a burden and it's better not to have them if there's a real chance that its not gonna work out just right. These advertisements remind us of what we all know: not only that nothing in life is guaranteed, but that somehow, with a bit of grit, optimism, friendship, and faith - heck, with just a little of any of hose things - life has a way of turning out OK, unless by OK we mean two kids and a dog and a white picket fence and two nice cars with annual vacations overseas. In that case, our odds narrow somewhat. But if we can roll with the punches just a little, we don't typically have to resort to murder to get things to work out passably. Sometimes, oftentimes, if we have eyes to see, things will turn out far better than we could have planned (not dreamed, but planned) ourselves anyway.

Actually, scratch my metaphor about poison. These ads are ingenious little bits of warm sunlight casting in among fungus that had been hidden in shadows. Just like fungus avoids sunlight, the abortionists avoid truth:

Life is worth living.

An Unlikely Alliance to Overthrow the West: More Signs of the Times

CNSNews.com has two pieces that struck me.

The first piece reports on comments made by Harry Knox, who serves on President Barack Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. In the National Prayer Hour during which the accompanying video is recorded, Knox calls evil (in this case, the distribution of contraception) good, and good (Pope Benedict XVI) evil (for opposing the distribution of those sinful little population control devices) (Isaiah 5:20).  Notably, this event is the American Prayer Hour, not intended to call upon God Almight for his help with some issue or another, but to affirm on their own "inclusive values" and to call on Uganda to stop being mean by doing things like outlawing sodomy.  The Pope's reason - aside from the religious - for disapproving of the use of contraception to fight the spread of HIV is that is just doesn't work.  Even though Pope Benedict XVI has, on this issue, the backing of findings of

researchers at notoriously flim-flam, conservative institutions like Harvard, Knox reasserts his claim that the Pope and the Church are hurting poor people in the name of Jesus.  Knox, unlike the Church, cares very much for (heterosexual and juvenile) HIV patients in Africa and Asia.  He does all sorts of things to help them, like run orphanages for HIV-infected children, has cooperated with all sorts of federal programs to prevent the spread of AIDS at home and abroad, has been conducting vigorous propaganda campaigns in Africa against risky behavior, and provide about 25% of the world's AIDS patients with their primary care.

Oh, wait.  My mistake.  It's the Catholic Church that does those things for AIDS patients.

The second piece reports on a Dutch legislator being prosecuted for "discrimination and incitement to hatred" for claiming that the Koran has been linked to extremist violence.  I know what you're thinking: what an outlandish claim.  I know.  Aside from the backwardness of prohibiting free speech, the Dutch prosecutor doesn't seem to think that the actual truth of the statements made should be relevant to their prosecution.  The whole bit makes me think of the final book in C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, in which some treacherous Narnians sell their people out to a foreign, despotic people from southern deserts, in the hope of personal gain.  The Dutch legislator being prosecuted has asked to call for his defense Mohammed Bouyeri, a "Dutchman" of Moroccan extraction convicted of shooting and stabbing to death Theo Van Gogh for making a documentary that claimed unpleasant things about Islam.  Bouyeri stuck a note to van Gogh's chest using the knife with which he murdered the filmmaker.  In the note, he also threatened to murder Dutch legislator Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a nationalized Somali woman who uses her new Dutch nationality and legislative voice to campaign against the abuse of women in peaceful Islamic countries like Iran and her native Somalia.  Surprisingly, the Dutch prosecutor and judges in the case is nervous about calling Bouyeri to the stand.



I am concluding that the powers that be hate Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church, and the West they built up so much that any enemy of His will suffice as an ally.  It does not matter to them what lies they tell or whom they invite to come be their new caliph.  This whole democracy thing is passe, anyway, right?  Time to progress to something better.

That's a LOT

That's how much money the President wants to spend in his budget proposal more than the federal government will be "earning" in tax revenues.  That's right.  That's his proposed additional debt.  And it doesn't appear to count the various emergency appropriations that will be sought midyear for this or that.  After all, one never knows when more rich bankers or unions will need bailing out of their own suicidal greed.

I did some quick math, and that deficit is $5333 per resident in the U.S., give or take.  Since most residents aren't taxpayers (too young, too old, not gainfully employed), it is considerably more per taxpayer.  There were 99,880,223 taxpayers in the US in 2005, which is close enough to now, meaning that the president is asking us each to borrow approximately $16000 more.  Again.

So much for reducing the deficit.  Does this strike anybody else as insane and immoral?  Who will have the courage to tell these lunatics that enough is enough?!

John Maynard Keynes vs. F. A. Hayek

The little video below is perhaps the best summary that I have ever encountered of Keynesian economics and Hayek's economic theories.

Keynes' economic theories are dominated by the overarching theme that regulation and stimulation of the economy by a central authority (i.e., government) are the chief driving economic factor and, when fine-tuned, can become the chief means of steady growth. Any number of mechanisms are to be deployed to achieve this end: stimulus, detachment of money from an actual standard coupled with printing more money and adjusting interest rates, etc. Borrowed money can be used to stimulate growth to such a degree that growth outstrips the interest rates and can then be used to repay the loans painlessly. Sound familiar?

Hayek advocated government restricting its role to policing the market to ensure the rule of law and a market genuinely free - including of unreasonable governmental intervention. He emphasized the role of savings and prudent investment as the chief source of authentic, long term prosperity. He did not believe that debt could be made into a source of genuine wealth. Sound unpleasant?

By why is this little reflection appearing on a blog devoted to presenting the Gospel? Well, simply put, because how we live our life has spiritual implications, and our religious faith should affect how we live our life.

The rich rules over the poor,

and the borrower is the slave of the lender, (Prov 22:7).

Will we be a nation of free men, relying on our own wits and upon Divine Providence, or will we be a nation of slaves dependent upon foreign masters for a bit of dried bread, all that's left over from the sweat of our brow?

Thanks again, Anchoress.

The Roar of the Unborn Babies

On Friday, January 22, over 200,000 people showed up to participate in the annual March for Life, the largest annual demonstration in the nation's capital.

As usual, the Democratic Administration and Congress turned a completely blind eye, as if the couldn't see the crazy traffic patterns and endless streams of people.  I mean, it was a small group on the edge of the city, out of sight.  So it's not surprising that the Prez couldn't see them.

Oh, wait.  I forgot.  It was 200,000 people who marched, and they marched down the central street of the nation's capital - Constitution Avenue.  And they did it in broad daylight.

But they were kooky nuts, the kind you just have to ignore.  You know: lots of taxpaying, middle-class, family-values types.  And so monotonously homogenous.  I mean, groups like Presbyterians for Life, Lesbians for Life, Democrats for Life, Jews for Life... not to mention women who have had abortions... no diversity there.  Just lots of white, mean, conservative Catholic men.  No news here, people.  Move along.  Lol.

Well, for decades Congress, the Courts, and Democratic Administrations have ignored the personhood of unborn children, democratic process, the growing consensus of the American people, and even basic principles of morality and constitutional law.  Now, Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) has admitted that the Senate's version of healthcare "reform" cannot pass in the House, and Rep. Pence (R-In.) has attributed it to the bill's abortion language.  Though the Democratic Party has ignored an increasing amount of its own constituency and all manner of other voices and concerns, the little babies have them now, right where they want them.  The Democratic Party leadership is like the monkey with its hand caught in the cookie jar - they can't get their precious healthcare obamination because they won't stop clutching onto their government-funded abortions.

In a surprise twist of fate, the little children have saved from economic catastrophe an America that cannot bring itself to save them because of our love of economic comfort.

Let's pray that we learn to return the favor.

Babies and Distributism

Here's a little taste of G. K. Chesterton, whose writing style is somewhat ironic because as he writes, the reader has the constant sensation that he is being led somewhere and only the author knows.  He is a master of paradoxical conclusions designed to blow his ideological opponents out of the water.

I hope it is not a secret arrogance to say that I do not think I am exceptionally arrogant; or if I were, my religion would prevent me from being proud of my pride. Nevertheless, for those of such a philosophy, there is a very terrible temptation to intellectual pride, in the welter of wordy and worthless philosophies that surround us today. Yet there are not many things that move me to anything like a personal contempt. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. I do not feel any contempt for a Bolshevist, who is a man driven to the same negative simplification by a revolt against very positive wrongs. But there is one type of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular propagandist of what he or she absurdly describes as Birth-Control.

I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes sure that there shall never be any birth to control. It cannot for instance, determine sex, or even make any selection in the style of the pseudo-science of Eugenics. Normal people can only act so as to produce birth; and these people can only act so as to prevent birth. But these people know perfectly well as I do that the very word Birth-Prevention would strike a chill into the public, the instant it was blazoned on headlines, or proclaimed on platforms, or scattered in advertisements like any other quack medicine. They dare not call it by its name, because its name is very bad advertising. Therefore they use a conventional and unmeaning word, which may make the quack medicine sound more innocuous.

Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a flat refusal to take the first and most obvious step along the road of Eugenics. Once grant that their philosophy is right, and their course of action is obvious; and they dare not take it; they dare not even declare it. If there is no authority in things which Christendom has called moral, because their origins were mystical, then they are clearly free to ignore all the difference between animals and men; and treat men as we treat animals. They need not palter with the stale and timid compromise and convention called Birth-Control. Nobody applies it to the cat. The obvious course for Eugenists is to act towards babies as they act towards kittens. Let all the babies be born; and then let us drown those we do not like. I cannot see any objection to it; except the moral or mystical sort of objection that we advance against Birth-Prevention. And that would be real and even reasonable Eugenics; for we could then select the best, or at least the healthiest, and sacrifice what are called the unfit. By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly from mercenary motives. Until I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold, scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement.

But there is a third reason for my contempt, much deeper and therefore more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be "free" to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word "free." By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires' notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

G. K. Chesterton, "Babies and Distributism," from The Well and the Shallows

I hope you enjoyed that little article as much as I have. Little did Chesterton know... or perhaps he did suspect... that before long an age would come in which men would murder babies in the womb, starve them in hospital janitor closets, and openly speak in the classroom of murdering them into their first years of life postpartum.

How Britain Is Eating Its Young

I have decided to embed below one of the very best articles I have ever read on modern socio-economic woes, written from a macroscopic perspective. I am embedding it, because if I made it downloadable now that the original magazine has it archived and available only for purchase, I would certainly get my pants sued off - or at least be violating their copyright.

You need the Adobe Reader plugin to view this document.

More Beating of Drums for Death...

Montana's high court rang in the New Year by ruling that it's OK to murder sick and, presumably, very old people.  Oh, wait - that's right, it's to be called mercy killing or assisted suicide or death with dignity or some such nonsense.  The court affirmed a lower court's December 6 ruling to the same extent.

Why Montana?

Hmmm... cash-strapped state... aging population...  Well, I suppose it doesn't matter why Montana, because the whole country is headed in that direction.  It will be a perfect storm - a trifecta of previously unlikely scenarios inevitably colliding:

1. Economic pressure from our incomprehensible national debt;
2. Demographic pressure of our aging baby-boomers who are now beginning to retire in earnest;
3. Foreign pressure from our Chinese debt-masters to impose the same sort of draconian measures that we impose upon our debtor nations.

When these three factors coincide - and they will - we are gonna start gassing 'boomers like you can't believe.  Mark my words; this prediction takes no great foresight, only commonsense.  We've long since been solving our unborn problems by killing them in the privacy of the womb; now Montana's court, the first such state high court ruling in the land, says that privacy protects the "right to kill granny."  They didn't call it that, but will the aged infirm or the sick have much more voice than those in the womb?

Christians, let's resolve in 2010 to pray harder.

Bishop Allen Vigneron's "10 Rules for Handling Disagreement Like a Christian"

If you've never encountered these rules, please read them.  Memorize any that are not intuitive to you.  I recently read a suggestion that Christians brainstorm a set of rules for internet-based discourse, rules like, "Assume the best intention and good faith of those with whom you are corresponding."  A noble idea.

The Slaughter of the Innocents Goes On...

Today, Monday 28 December 2009, is the feast of the Holy Innocents, those children slaughtered by Herod (Mt 2:16) in his demented plot to destroy the Christ Child, thereby winning the notorious distinction of being the first manifestation of anti-Christ in history.  The Church recognizes his little victims as something like martyrs, even donning red on their feast day in honor of their blood.  They did not voluntarily give their lives rather than deny Christ, yet their innocence poured out still bears witness to His.

In our times, anti-Christ has been powerfully active in many modern regimes.  The Nazis and the Soviets were both explicitly anti-Christian.  They were defeated, but we must not lull ourselves into thinking that anti-Christ was, or even that his plan was delayed.  The Evil One is crafty beyond our reckoning.  I believe that part of his plan was to discredit evil itself - he has done this by psychologizing sins into mere neuroses on the one hand, and by making us think that a plan or idea cannot be evil unless it is proposed by a short man with a funny mustachio and a German accent.  We are mistaken if we believe either of those two lies.  Sin is sin, and we are all guilty of it.  Some sins are small, and others are immense.  We must use our meager powers and whatever grace God gives us to resist it all.  We cannot compromise with it, and must realize that the Enemy always tries to sell us sin by bundling it with genuine goods, because only a lunatic would pick sin otherwise.  So intimacy and pleasure, both good, are used to sell adultery; adventure and profit, both good, are used to convince people to burgle or rob.

Now health care is being used to push abortion.  Make no mistake - unless the law specifically forbids the funding of abortion, it will be slipped in as one more entitlement.  If the developers of the health care proposals under consideration did not want abortions to be funded directly or with subsidies, they would include prohibitive provisions in their bills.  And I can think of no better way - nor can Uncle Sam - to encourage something, other than to pay for it.
Please pray for Bart Stupak (D-MI) and the group he is rousing to resist this atrocity, this holocaust to Moloch. Rumor has it that he and his group are already being brought under tremendous pressure from the highest levels.

Fellow Americans, we are capable of helping each other out without paying to kill each other's babies.  America, we can do better than abortion!

The War in the House

Leaders among pro-life Democrats in the House of Representatives include Bart Stupak, Tim Holden, Kathy  Dahlkemper, James Oberstar, Dan Boren, Gene Taylor, and Jim Marshall.  Of these, only one (Dan Boren) is non-Catholic.  We've all heard about how many of the leaders of the pro-abortion lobby in the House describe themselves as "Catholic."

This is huge.  It means, as far as I can tell, that what we are witnessing unfolding is not a battle between Democrats and Republicans over abortion or abortion-funding.  We are witnessing a battle among Catholics, with the United States House of Representatives as the battlefield, and government-funded abortion as the current strategic target.  This is huge.  It may be apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word.

The Greek word apocalypsis means "unveiling" and is translated into Latin as revelatio, from which we get the word "revelation."  The Book of Revelation, by prophesying about events at the end of the time, ought to expose us to ourselves.  It ought to make us stop and think, "Say, what side am I on?  Have I really given it over to Christ?  Or do I just want to feel good about myself by calling myself a Christian?"  We are seeing such a revelatory conflict now in our legislature.  It is to some degree a microcosm of America, where the same conflict as a whole is underway.  It is easy to call oneself Catholic and to play that card whenever convenient, as a sort of credential about having roots or deeper values or something.  It is a lot more difficult to actually sink roots and stand for something, like, say Jesus Christ.  It might sound revolutionary, I know, or radical, or even revolting, but that's what I thought "Catholic" meant.

Now we are seeing in our legislature and in our society as a whole who has actually believed that, and who has only used that popular belief to their own personal gain.

Again, no need to worry.  This stuff is all over the gospels and epistles.  Jesus himself told us that these things would happen so that when they did, our faith in Him would be deepened rather than shaken.  Let's keep praying, doing what we can, and trusting in Him.